Pathologists describe dissecting the bodies of aborted babies

In an article entitled “What Happens to Unborn Babies After Abortion? Pathologists Share the Horrors” in LifeNews, writer Jonathon Van Maren reveals a horrible conversations that took place on a forum board for pathologists. Pathologists deal with the remains of surgeries, and these ones have had to inspect during their careers. The quotes were taken from the message board here.

From one pathologist:

16 weeks – legal to abort all over the country

“Anyone get tripped on these? I’m talking especially the big ones, where you can actually make out facial expressions like they knew they were being hacked the hell up (im serious). I almost went bonkers once over one, that is some scary crap. Am I the only pathologist who freaks when a 0.5 cm eye ball comes rolling out of bag and stares right at you…I know we are thinking this, just no one in pathology is talking about it.”

He/she also said:

“One incident really freaked me, it was a boy fetus, at least 3+ pounds, around 24+ weeks. It sat decomposing because the rest of the staff was AFRAID of it, Im not joking. Then the chief of staff told me to deal with it because I was the FNG (f-kcin new guy) so I went to work. Pulled out 2 well formed arms and then the torso, headless. The head was at the bottom of the container, when I pulled it, he had this expression of such utter horror it flipped me wayyyy out, my PA saw it and ran, literally left work and went on disability (Im serious here). It was like a headless screaming baby, like it had been born at least for a split second to realize it was screwed and let out one agonal yelp. The story of this reverberated around the department, someone actually accused me of doing what should have been a ME case and threatened to call the medical board! Im not joking, I woke up once shortly after that in a cold sweat with piss running down my leg….not pretty.”

24 weeks

Another:

Baby at only eight weeks – no perfectly formed arms and legs, complete with fingers and toes

“Totally trippy man. We get a fair number of fragmented fetuses from abortion procedures and they come in a container with formalin. The fact that they’re all hacked up is disturbing to begin with. Of course, there is the whole eyeball issue which freaks me out as well.”

He/she also says:

Well, all you can say in a lot of these final diagnosis reports are that the fetus is fragmented, you don’t know what the sex is (unless you’ve found the gonads and histologically they’re confirmed as balls or babymakers), you’ve identified some organs, and you give the estimated gestational age based on foot length. I dunno what else really…I haven’t had too many of these cases but all of these reports with my name on it are pretty simple writeups.

Foot of a baby aborted at 16 weeks

A third pathologist said:

“Most of my abortion-path anecdotes come from my PSF. Here one of the residents grosses most of them in as part of some project he is doing, and we are more than happy to let him.

1) Anencephalic baby, otherwise intact. Those are disturbing to look at. Saw quite a few and they never really get comfortable to look at.

12 week hand

2) When doing one POC that was about 12-15 weeks, somewhere around there, I put through the entire hand into a histology block, so that I could see what a developing hand looked like. The histotech freaked out when she saw it and I wasn’t allowed to do that again. So I stuck later to doing things that weren’t recognizable, such as the full cross section of the 8 week fetus anencephalic head, and the full larynx, etc.

3) The strangest are when you get the macerated contents, and you are able to recognize a few parts here and there – usually a leg or an arm, sometimes the heart. But it’s odd when you can’t find a large portion of it.

Visible parts of aborted babies from 6 to 14 weeks

4) There was a stillborn birth at about 12 weeks or so and it was sent to the morgue for some reason, and never claimed. A couple of months later the family decided they wanted an autopsy. So I had to do an autopsy on a mummified 12 week fetus. They had bothered to put the little bonnet on its head, but otherwise it was shriveled and brown.

16 weeks

5) 16 week or so fetus, the POC is sent down as one specimen, and there is a second specimen labeled “heart.” They wanted us to identify if there were any clear cardiac anomalies. It was about the size of a marble. I took it to the dissecting scope and found the PFO but that was about all I could tell.

6) about a 12 week fetus, sent down POC and wanted to know if it was an imperforate anus.

Unborn baby at only seven weeks after conception

On a related note though, eyeballs are the specimen that freaks me out the most. Cutting into an eye makes me squeal. I remember doing it the first time in anatomy lab and I felt like I was sticking a knife into my own eye.”

….

“I usually like chow down on White Castle while my trusty lab assistant has to stack all the baby body parts, limb amputations and reduction mastectomies into the incinerator. It has almost a Nazi concentration camp feel it all sometimes, one of my assistants today tried to joke about this leg and aborted fetus we were transporting, I snapped “have some f-ing respect!!” then started laughing too, you cant help it. Its so unbelievably insane. Nothing med school prepares you for.

Leg of aborted baby at 12 weeks

….

Another pathologist:

I had a holoprosencephaly case too, with the proboscis. I handle the aborted fetuses okay; the only thing I really dislike is having to stick my finger in the mouth to check for cleft palate. That gives me the willies.

One pathologist (the fifth one quoted) had no sympathy for the aborted babies and was not horrified by what he saw:

In any case, no, abortions don’t freak me out whatsoever. Maybe if a twin IUFD case showed up and one was giving the other a Dirty Sanchez, well, perhaps then I would take pause. Until then, no amount of googly eyeballs or tiny jaws dislocated “mid-scream” does anything to humanize the little sacks of neverweres for me.

There are quite a few things that I find disturbing, but few of them spill directly out of the womb.

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